Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerGov. Chris Christie makes his first budget address to a joint session of the New Jersey Legislature.

At this time last year, Chris Christie was traveling around the state telling people that he went to law school because he wasn’t any good at math.

Yesterday he proved it.

In his budget address, Christie proposed a funding formula that would make property tax relief impossible either until the end of time or until we get a governor who can handle arithmetic, whichever comes first.

Christie didn’t seem to be aware of that. But then he didn’t seem to realize that his new budget means big property tax hikes for his own county, not to mention his own town.

The problem was the bizarre formula our new governor instituted for reducing state education aid, which is by the far the biggest source of property tax relief. His goal was to save about $800 million. If he had simply made the cuts across the board, most of the cuts would have been felt in the places that get most of the aid, the cities.

Instead, the administration came up with a formula that based school aid cuts not on the amount of aid received, but on total spending. All districts will lose 5 percent of their budgets in aid.

Mendham Township got 6 percent of its budget in state aid when Jon Corzine was living in Drumthwacket. Now that the governor lives in town, Mendham will get a mere 1 percent of its budget in state aid. That’s not a 5 percent cut in aid; that’s an 83 percent cut.

As for the big Democratic-controlled counties like Hudson, Union and Essex — those people who voted for Corzine — they will be protected from big cuts. Newark, for example, will still receive well in excess of $700 million annually, far more than Morris, Bergen, Somerset, Sussex and Hunterdon counties combined.

The rest of Morris County won’t fare much better. Under Corzine, the 40 districts in Morris got a mere $157 million in aid annually. Under Christie, that figure is expected to fall well below the $100 million mark.

The schools in the other suburban areas that gave the Guv his margin of victory will be hit equally hard. At least 60 school districts around the state will receive no aid at all. I suspect that all but a few of these towns backed Christie, trusting his promise to bring them property tax relief. Sorry. Property taxes will soar.

We’ll know how much later in the week when those cuts come out. At that point, a lot of the people who voted for Christie will be screaming. As for the Democrats, they’re laughing. One senator told me that in caucus the Democrats had a hearty guffaw over the way Christie went after his own base. "If a Democrat had done this, the Republicans would be screaming bloody murder," said one former Corzine staffer.

It’s even worse than that, though. Another initiative Christie proposed would essentially freeze that funding formula forever. Our math-challenged governor proposed a constitutional amendment to be put on the November ballot that would cap future property tax increases at 2.5 percent annually.

Sound nice? Not if you consider that the new rule would make it impossible to change that Corzine-era school-funding formula.

Both of Christie’s primary opponents last year — former Bogota mayor Steve Lonegan and then-assemblyman Rick Merkt — proposed distributing aid equally from the state Property Tax Relief Fund, which is made up of all the revenue from the state income tax and a half-cent of sales-tax revenue.

Merkt, who also lives in Mendham, made a point of challenging Christie to stand up for his own town and county. Merkt argued that Morris taxpayers get back only about a dime on the dollar of income taxes they pay out. But what would the cities do if Morris were to start getting an equal share of state aid? They’d have to support their own schools with their own property taxes.

It was a good argument, but it will be obsolete if Christie gets his way. If the cities can’t raise taxes, they’ll be dependent on state aid for eternity.

And then there’s the other form of property tax relief — rebates. Lonegan proposed cutting rebates in favor of an equal-funding plan. Christie promptly sent out mailers slamming Lonegan. Yesterday, Christie announced he’s ending the rebates. He does have a new funding plan, though, but unlike Lonegan’s, it makes things worse for the people who supported him, not better.

It’s a good thing Chris Christie’s no good at math. If he were, he’d be pretty peeved at the new governor.